Over my summer vacation, I read several books. Among them was historian Tyler Anbinder’s book Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. A few years ago, I sat among the lovely rolling hills and cliffs of Donegal, and wondered how people could leave such a temperate and beautiful country to live and die in a New York tenement. Anbinder’s book explains. The title of the book comes from the testimony of a Famine refugee. “Any man or woman are fools that would not venture and come to this plentiful country where no man or woman ever hungered, or ever will, and where you will not be seen naked,” one Irish emigrant wrote back home in 1850. It also hints at the book’s surprising and contrarian take. Our typical view of the Irish immigrants who left during the Famine is that they remained poor and marginalized for generations before rising. Anbinder’s book focuses on the unusually extensive and complete records of Emigrant Savings Bank, which most Irish immigrants used in New York. Nearly every immigrant improved his lot in life by moving to America; a near-majority of the first generation of Famine immigrants who arrived as low-skilled laborers finished their careers as white-collar workers. Less than one-third remained day laborers throughout their lives.
And for the vast majority of Irish immigrants, even the worst New York tenement was an improvement on what they left in Ireland. For decades before the Famine, Irish poverty and misery were increasing. Laws dating back to the defeat of the Celtic order in 1603 that had excluded native Irish Catholics from owning land were amplified by penal laws even after Ireland had been incorporated into the union with Great Britain at the start of the 19th century. The dependence of Irish Catholic laborers on the potato was almost total. Men would typically eat up to 14 pounds of potatoes per day every day of the year as their exclusive source of calories, with meat on perhaps Christmas and Easter. Summer months were known as “starvation months” for decades before the Famine. Housing conditions for many in the west of Ireland were little more than mud huts, with leaky, buggy thatched roofs. No blankets or bedsheets. Just entire families sleeping in a pile, often with animals, on a wet floor in less than 200 square feet of space, making even the windowless tenements spacious and hygienic by comparison.
The book begins with an astonishing story of an immigrant from the very poorest area in Ireland, the estates of the Marquis of Lansdowne, in Kenmare. The man comes as a tailor and eventually founds his own stores to sell clothes. Then he takes a short enlistment in the Civil War, selling his two stores in order to field an Irish brigade. He comes back and fails to get a promised political appointment, enduring some hard times after his wife had left him with four children for another man. But he has a spectacular political rise in New York, funds the studying of civic groups, including those promoting the Irish language, and delivers an Irish-language address at the inauguration of Grover Cleveland.
Even the Irish hawking varied goods — cork, sewing supplies, coal — on the street in the 1840s and 1850s often made serious money doing so. The book concludes that the Famine Irish were the first “poor huddled masses” to arrive in America and forever changed America’s view of itself, as an engine for turning the poor into something else. For me, it seemed to emphasize that it took the incredible genius, negligence, and malice of the then-greatest empire to keep such a plucky people down.
The trick of the book, in relying so heavily on bank records that could be cross-referenced with ancestry data in two countries and on ship manifests, makes the whole feel like a miracle of historical precision.